Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a simulation apparatus and method for intracellular responses, and more particularly, to a 3D simulation apparatus and method for various intracellular responses using gene expression information.
Discussion of the Related Art
As research on system biology is vigorously carried out, information regarding chemical substances constituting a living body, such as ions, proteins, etc. in cells, tends to be accumulated. Recently, tools which may analyze various responses in cells, such as metabolic responses of chemical substances, signal transduction responses, etc. are developed and thus importance of cell modeling rises. Particularly, in the case of BioModels, it is reported that there are about 577 curated biomodels and about 722 biomodels in a previous step prior to curation, and the numbers of these biomodels tend to be increased.
Mathematical prediction of biomodels is executed through development of tools or programs which may simulate biomodels. In the initial stage of research, biomodels were mainly analyzed through metabolic pathway analysis and such analysis is executed based on tools to find the value of an ordinary differential equation, such as Gepasi, Gopasi, etc.
However, since most intracellular responses require understanding of more complicated regulation mechanisms as signal transduction pathways, analysis by the above-described method, research or tools is limited. Therefore, tools which may simulate signal transduction of cells including VCells, etc. have been developed. MCell, which may simulate actual intracellular responses in a 3D space of an actual cell differently from the conventional tools to find the value of the ordinary differential equation, has been developed, and CellBlender, which was recently developed, supports editing, design and visualization of biomodels. Further, Smoldyn, which was recently developed, may execute modeling of the 3D space of a cell, diffuse molecules in the cell through Brownian Motion, and simulate whether or not respective substances are stochastically bonded and react with each other using a probability model.
However, the above-described simulation tools or methods may execute only fragmentary simulation in which chemical reaction is caused based on initial conditions and equations and thus the aspect of a response until a specific time is measured, and have disadvantages, such as a impossibility of executing simulation throughout the life cycle of cells according to production and degradation of proteins, which are actually generated in the cells, and a difficulty in delicately analyzing mass movement between cellular organelles and cytoplasm and biochemical responses.